Keeping Current on Citation Changes

Beginning in October, the option to export MLA 7 citations will no longer be supported in Gale resources. Why is this happening? It has a lot to do with what our customers tell us and what features are being used. We sat down with Gale eBooks on GVRL product manager Kristin Fust to better understand:

“At Gale, we regularly review usage of our product features and functionality to ensure we are focusing our efforts on the tools that users find most valuable. Removing MLA 7 from the citation tools within Gale products allows us to support the most recent citation styles.

Since MLA 8 was released in April 2016, we’ve seen a steady decrease in the use of MLA 7, as more and more customers have become familiar with and adopted MLA 8.

MLA 8 will continue to be available, as well as APA and Chicago styles.”

So there you have it. Stay informed about updates made to your Gale resources by following the product updates category of the Gale Blog.

2 thoughts on “Keeping Current on Citation Changes”

I am disappointed. I hate the way MLA 8 looks, with its long URLs. I dislike that it doesn’t show that an element is missing, like a publisher. In my work with high school students the appearance of n.p. or n.d. is an instant red flag. Without those markers, students don’t notice that they’ve omitted important information.

Thank you for providing this feedback. We aim to provide accurate information for citations but recognize that MLA 8 allows for more flexibility and preference than the previous edition. Certain publication types do not require publisher information, such as periodicals. We do aim to provide this information for other publication types whenever available, so if you have any specific examples you’d be willing to share, we would be happy to look into these instances.

Regarding the URLs, we’re happy to share that we are working on shorting the URLs in many of our products and hope for this work to be completed by the spring. Some databases, such as our In Context suite, are already utilizing these shorter URLs for citations.